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Knack Review

Knack looks like it’s setting out to be the PS4’s new leading mascot for the next console generation, with fantastic visuals and brilliant particle effects that aim to demonstrate the PS4’s raw power. Sadly, that’s all the good found in knack. If you were expecting a fun and risk taking adventure game, you were wrong.

Knack’s aesthetics are really cool, the whole game looks like a Pixar movie, and that’s awesome. Every character looks distinctly cartoony and they all have little quirks that make them stand out, such as the brash adventurer or the condescending secretary. The enemies are also really cool, with the orcs having a variety of personalities and traits that make them much more than typical villains. However, the majority of this comes from their actions, not their words, as Knack manages to be a consistently boringly written game from the outset. Characters only ever talk exposition and never bring any life through their voice; it’s all left to their movements.

Knack plays like a sloppy mix of Crash Bandicoot, God of War and a hallway simulator. The player takes control of a small Knack and must run through linier corridors to enter a room filled with enemies, dodging and defeating these enemies rewards Knack with artifacts that make Knack grow bigger, increasing his overall size and life bar. The player then goes through another door to another hallway where there may be pits to jump over, or just a plain hallway, until they get to the next room filled with enemies. It’s copy and paste right from the get go.

While Knack may want to be like God of War in its combat, it misses the key element that makes God of War so fun, the extreme combos and enemy variety. Knack can punch with the square button. That’s it, that’s the attack button. No combos, no advanced tactics and timings to take into account, nope, just hammer the square button until the enemies evaporate. Boo. What makes things more tedious is the fact that Knack dies in two (sometimes even one) hits, and when he dies the uneven checkpoints make trudging through the same enemies again and again become so infuriating that we needed to for a walk and think about puppies to calm down.

Knack is a boring and shallow attempt to make a creative new adventure game for the next generation. Instead of making a new Crash Bandicoot or combo action game, Playstation fans get a seemingly cheep knock off version of past games. There aren’t many PS4 games out there right now, but we recommend holding off on Knack for something better, or at least wait until a price drop.